Biocultural Ethics and Hollywood Climate Movies, 2004-2024

Biocultural Ethics and Hollywood Climate Movies adopts a coevolutionary ethics and epistemology to historicize and critique popular climate fiction (‘cli-fi’) movies from 2004 to 2024, and recommends this framework as a corrective to the dominant cultural norms and practices that have dominated the US nation’s past response to the crisis. The opening chapters explain the importance of human affects, stories, and performances in shaping elaborations of our cultural differences, including our politics. Integrated within this general framework is an introduction to species-level biocultural ethics, a summary of our present climate emergency, and the response of Hollywood to this crisis. Most US cli-fi films, following the success of The Day After Tomorrow (2004), followed the formula of the sci-fi disaster movie, which drew upon Cold War fears of nuclear war. Soon, other film genres challenged the dominance of disaster movies. These films, including the blockbuster Avatar, fantasized the genre of social justice melodrama to create domestic and war-of-the-world’s conflicts. A few US climate films, however, notably Paul Schrader’s First Reformed (2017), modified the thriller genre to explore the healing possibilities of tragic guilt and grief. Biocultural Ethics also examines what may be called climate-related films because their ideological responses to problems exacerbated by climate chaos have helped to alter the political landscape of the US. These include libertarian, vigilante, and Christian nationalist movies from the past twenty-five years. Hollywood Climate Movies takes a bioethical look at these films, which have helped to legitimate the nation’s lurch toward authoritarian rule. In response to these and other threats to liberal governance, the final chapter counters with bioethical principles and proposals.